Rosetta Stone Version 3: Japanese Level 1 & 2 Set with Audio Companion
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend Rosetta Stone Personal Edition contains everything you need to start learning a language. It's built around our award-winning Rosetta Stone curriculum, which has been adopted by organizations around the world including the U.S. Army, NASA, major corporations such as Deutsche Telecom, IKEA, Royal Dutch Shell, and over 10,000 schools worldwide--and is available in 31 languages spoken by over 90% of the world's population. The comprehensive language-learning solution that fits… Product details and pricing info |
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1 Customer Review Posted
- Huge improvement over version 2
- version 3 of Rosetta Stone Japanese is hugely improved over version 2. I always thought that v2 was a decent product to reinforce learning through other methods, and for building vocabular. However, I would never have recommended v2 as a primary tool for learning the Japanese language. This is because v2 had some big drawbacks. For one, there were no explanations of anything whatsoever. You were presented with a picture and the phrase, both spoken and written, and you had to match the picture to the phrase. After a while, you simply memorize which picture goes to which phrase, and sometimes you're not really sure what exactly in the picture is being referred to. Is it the skateboard? The skateboarder? The verb skateboarding? I'm still not sure to the answer to that question, even after searching the internet to try to find out.
Another drawback of version 2 is that the grammar of the language is not explained, and the Japanese language is structured in ways that is often difficult for westerners to grasp.
V3 has improved greatly in both these areas, although they have not completly been solved. There are still no explanations or definitions or anything like that, so you are still expected to grasp it intuitively. However, they have added more variety and interactivity to the lessons. This makes it easier to intuitivly grasp these principles. For instance, in v2, you were given a phrase that contained both a question, and the answer to the question, and you were given a picture that goes with the phrase. You simply had to remember which picture went with the phrase, and the next time you were presented with the phrase, just recall which picture went with it before. In v3 the phrase given might ask a question, and you would have to select the correct answer yourself, requiring you to actually think about what is being said instead of recalling a memorized answer. - 2008-12-01, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
